White Ivy(102)

What was this feeling? Ivy wondered. Fear, confusion, tender hate, all mixed together and tinged with the sense of impending danger. Like a hostage trying to please her captor. But who was the captor and who was the hostage?

“Well?” said Roux, releasing her. “How do you like the car?” He inspected the gears, opened the glove compartment, patted the dashboard with a paternal air.

“It’s beautiful,” said Ivy. “Thanks for letting me drive it.”

“You can have it.”

“Seriously?”

“You’re always complaining about your car breaking down.”

“I’ll ruin this one before long, with my history.” Then a terrible thought struck her. “Is it registered under my name?”

Roux’s eyes flicked over her sardonically, mistaking her agonizing fear for childish petulance. “Obviously not—I bought it—but if it means that much to you, I can transfer the title over—”

“No!” She grinned bashfully, relief making her brisk and overly eager. “Let’s get going.” She flicked on the turn signal. Roux strapped on his seat belt.

“Where exactly are we going?” he asked as she merged onto the freeway.

“Hiking.”

He frowned. “Isn’t it the wrong season for that?”

“I told you to dress warmly. I’ll have to speed a bit. It’s supposed to snow later.”

He took her lead and didn’t speak much, fiddling with the radio, rolling down the windows to smoke. The wind blew his disheveled black hair over his eyes; he didn’t look so much like a handsome man riding in a sports car as an actor playing a handsome man riding in a sports car. She, too, felt as if she were acting out a scene from an old movie, perhaps a scene near the credits, where the couple drives away from the city and bursts through a tunnel in their getaway car. That’s what this is, Ivy thought. A getaway car.

The sides of Route 93 were brown with slush and ice. Occasionally they saw a carcass of a dead deer or rodent, dragged to the side of the road and half-buried in a mound of fresh snow. Each mile away from Boston, the temperature outside dropped a fraction of a degree. The radio turned staticky, and then she drove with only the hum of the engine as backdrop. The Audi seemed to drive itself, responsive to her lightest touch, without any jerky movements or bumps when they went over potholes. Roux reached over and took her right hand, holding it limply in his lap while she drove with her other hand.

The roads turned narrow and winding; she made ascending circles around the mountain. Their breaths thinned; the view gave way to purple mountains and the brown lines of treetops. They hadn’t passed another car in the last thirty minutes.

“Cold today,” said Roux, rolling the window back up. “You sure about this hike? We could just go there”—he pointed at a billboard whizzing by, for Red Wingz Sports Bar and Grill, two for one, at the following exit toward Stocksfield—“and call it a day.” Despite his cultivated appetite for the luxurious, Roux truly liked places like that, roadside diners, Vegas casinos, hot dog stands, he was very American in that way. Places like that suited him, the way boats suited Gideon and rose gardens suited Liana Finley. “I want you to see this special spot,” Ivy said firmly. “It’s got to be today.”

Ten minutes later, she pulled off to the side of the road. It was a small lookout passengers used to photograph the view. In the summer, tourists could follow a set of rickety stairs to a tiny waterfall that trickled down the mountain. Of course, now everything was frozen. “This is it,” she said, cutting the engine.

Roux took in the absolute isolation around them. The few surrounding trees were bare and laden with icicles, thick with the smells of pine, frost, wet asphalt. “I never thought you were the outdoorsy type,” he said, rubbing his arms vigorously.

“I’m just superstitious. I wanted it to be—here.”

He didn’t ask the obvious: want what to be here? Since the time he’d slapped her across the face, he’d begun to mistake her deception for discretion.

“Where’s the start of the trail?” he asked.

“There is no trail.”

“You know your way up?”

“I’ve been here before.”

“With Gideon?”

She winced at the first break of code. “No.”

They walked half a mile from the parking lot and stopped by a nondescript junction with a small STAY IN YOUR LANE signpost. Ivy consulted her hand-drawn map. “This is it.”

“Lead the way,” said Roux, his mouth twitching in resigned good humor.

They began their ascent.

Underneath her coat she wore three layers, but he only had on a cotton zip-up under his fleece. “Give me your phone and wallet,” she said, “I’ll put them in my backpack so you can put your hands in your pockets.”

They walked on, slowly, because they were both smokers and out of shape, and because Ivy sometimes grew dizzy, her vision blurry with white spots, when she stopped to get a drink of water. The clouds momentarily parted and the sun peeked out, strong and distant, burning the backs of their necks. Sometimes she flapped her collar to let some of the heat escape from underneath her thermal shirt, and other times she walked with her hands tucked underneath her armpits.

“Are we almost there?” Roux asked at the two-mile mark. He took off his fleece and tied it around his waist. The first leg of the hike had been steep and unforgiving. During certain parts of it, they’d had to scrabble around snow-covered boulders, tripping over branches. Her hiking boots were sturdy but Roux wore thin suede shoes. He stamped his feet on a boulder to shake off the snow that’d collected around his ankles.